You go to the art gallery. You're looking at some famous painting and you just want to be able to get closer -- to touch it. Or you want to look at it without hordes of other people getting in your way.

Sunday 15 Jan 2012

One hundred years ago, the artist Ernst Kirchner, and others in his circle, moved to Berlin, hoping to establish themselves and their Expressionist art. This is the starting point for an exhibition of German modernism called The Mad Square. It's just opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and later this year it goes to the National Gallery of Victoria.

Stanislava Pinchuk, or Miso as she is better known, is a young street artist who has a mythical, fairytale quality. Her work sways between pasting hand-drawn portraits in city streets to intricate drawings and installations in gallery spaces. They often feature figures that have an early 20th century Eastern European look and feel to them -- very delicate and touching images.

Coastal Western Australia is the place where Tim Winton grew up and it's the place of his imagining and a setting for many of his novels -- and now his first play. Rising Water is in rehearsal right now, a production by Black Swan State Theatre Company and it opens in Perth later this month.

For the French thinker and writer Denis Diderot, drawing liberated the imagination, generating a fire and energy that finished paintings often lacked. Michelangelo urged his students to draw, draw and don't waste time. Even Picasso filled hundreds of notebooks with his lines and sketches.

Sunday 8 Jan 2012

Lloyd Newson is an Australian dancer who set up DV8 Physical Theatre in London 25 years ago. DV8's work reflects Newson's personal interests in social, psychological and political issues. He has largely rejected the abstraction that permeates most contemporary dance. Recently he has started exploring verbatim theatre, looking at the relationship between text (drawn from interviews) and movement.

Have you ever come across very elegant people dressed in wild neo-Victorian gear -- complete with top hats and brass goggles, bustles and leather bustiers? If so they were probably members of the ever growing Steam Punk community. Or maybe you are a DIY tinkerer, who has been making elaborate brass and watch-cog paraphernalia in your back shed, and suddenly you have realised you are not alone. So what's it all about?

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, graffiti painted sections have been featured in all sorts of museums and public places. It's the art and slogans that vividly express the story of the wall -- the exercise of political power and resistance to it.

Sunday 1 Jan 2012

How do you turn a gritty urban drama about a family of bloodthirsty murderers into an epic tale of love and betrayal? Well if you were rookie filmmaker David Michod you might get multi-award winning film composer Antony Partos to write the score -- which gives Animal Kingdom its operatic grunt.

In the lead-up to International Museum Day, a two-day symposium was held in Sydney on the subject of museums and climate change. Called 'Hot Science - Global Citizens' it featured a range of international and local speakers. The specific question raised by this event was how should our major cultural institutions present the subject of climate change, when it's a subject of debate and disagreement.

One of our best loved landscape painters, Fred Williams, is the subject of a big retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia right now. The exhibtion's called Infinite Horizions and it includes more than a hundred paintings, from landscapes around the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria near where Fred Williams lived, to views of the Murray River, to Weipa in North Queensland and the Pilbara in Western Australia. Fred Williams died in 1982, aged only 55. According to the director of the National Gallery of Australia, Ron Radford, he 'was Australia's greatest and most innovative landscape artist of the 20th century. His paintings defined a new way of viewing and understanding the Australian landscape.'